I know this probably belongs in Q&A, but that forum is filled lately, while this one is barren. So...I am putting it here.

I read this in a Chicago newspaper: "She was one of seven children who grew up in hardscrabble Humboldt Park, the daughter of an absentee father and a mother who worked in a hospital cafeteria." Now, Humboldt Park is part of Chicago's inner city; it is very urban. I had thought "hardscrabble" to refer to rural poverty, such as a poor sharecropper's life or earning a bare living from a farm. Yet, in
Dictionary.com's word of the day, they do seem to expand the meaning to urban poverty. Did it used to refer only to earning a bare living from the land? Or, have I just misunderstood the word?

I see that this entry has had a full 16 viewings but no answers so, for better or worse, I'll jump in.

While researching a question regarding the word game "Scrabble" I encountered what I consider to be an extremely interesting fact: It is possible to cheat by "Brailleing" (their term) the tiles in order to attempt to read them as you pick from the pile! While obviously extremely difficult, it is possible to do, particularly with the more desirable blank tiles, and is so much of a problem that there are places which produce un-Brailleable (my term) tiles for use by people who take the game way too seriously.


All this, of course, has nothing to do with the term "hardscrabble" but that oh-for-16 stat bugged me!

Well, thank you, CJ, for responding to my thread, anyway. I hate lone posts.

Can't say as though I have ever heard of "brailleing", though I am sure my husband cheats some way when we play scrabble. I bet that's it!

When I was looking up "hardscrabble", I also read a bit about "scrabble." Since it means "to scrape together hastily or frenetically", I wonder why the game was named "Scrabble." There's no time limit, or is there?

BTW, I saw that in tsuwm's wwftd, the second definition was "marked by poverty", though the first was "being or relating to a piece of barren or barely arable soil."